This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we talk with Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure director Matthew Bate, discuss the love letter Drive with director Nicolas Winding Refn, and talk intentionally bad filmmaking with The Worst Movie Ever! director Glenn Berggoetz. That’s two movies with exclamation marks in the title. Can you get more excited than that? Download This Episode

Andrei Tarkovsky was openly dissatisfied with his Solaris (1972), even though it has endured as perhaps the master’s best-known work, because he felt he didn’t successfully “transcend” the science-fiction genre as he later claimed he would seven years later with Stalker, a film that truly has few directly identifiable ties with the genre it purportedly emerged from. But knowing Tarkovsky, “transcending the genre” here doesn’t mean new interpretations of a familiar formula, but rather implies that Tarkovsky didn’t felt he accomplished what he sought to do in each of his works: make cinema a high art form comparable with the other arts. I respectfully disagree with Tarkovsky’s assessment of his own work. In fact, it is the clearly identifiable ties that Solaris has with its genre that helps the film achieve a specifically Tarkovskyan transcendence. While the filmmaker has a gesamtkunstwerk-approach to elevating cinema as an art form by integrating other great works of art into this work of art (an aspect especially apparent here in the film’s library scene), in Solaris Tarkovsky palpably struggles with the legacy of the genre he’s working in, and in doing so, copes with cinema’s own artistic language while putting forth a unique aesthetic that can singularly be experienced in cinema: the controlled experience of time.

Why Watch? Because it’s art about art. This short documentary is from the same time that made Catfish, but its subject matter is miles away from that film. Here, they step inside the workshop of famed artist Chris Burden to share his car-centric kinetic sculpture called “Metropolis II.” The art is stunning, the voice over illuminating, and one of the most breathtaking moments actually happens when he kills the power, and his city stops. What does it cost? Just 6 minutes of your time. Check out Metropolis II for yourself:

Why Watch? Because art is an act of violence. It’s difficult to tell what’s going on in this animated short at first, but it soon makes sense and hand-draws a metaphor for the creation process. The things we make end up making us. The style is a rough splatter of conflicting lines that blend together to create a stunning example of anatomic drawing (beware animated male nudity), and the percussive nature of the spike against marble punctuates everything with a sense of urgency. It’s no wonder this short won the Palme d’Or back in 1977. What does it cost? Just 2 minutes of your time. Check out Fight for yourself:

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, author Stephen Rebello joins us to share the insight of “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho,” and Gallery 1988 co-founder Jensen Karp gets crazy for cult and explains what Edward Scissorhands is doing in a painting with Jack Skellington. Plus, our very own Fatguy Kevin Carr joins me to play Good News/Bad News and tries to envision a spy thriller directed by Edgar Wright. Listen Here: Download This Episode

Every week, Landon Palmer and Cole Abaius log on to their favorite chat client of 1996 as EruditeSmurf007 and NostalgiaFiend238 in order to discuss some topical topic of interest. This week, the pair rewatches the trailer for The Smurfs in an attempt to figure out why something that harmless needs to be modernized. Weren’t they cute and lovable before? Does a movie like that really need to fake appeal to a snarky teenage audience or should children and their parents be enough? Who is responsible for Smurfette flashing her panties at everyone and who on the production thought pop culture references would buoy a terrible film? In shorter terms, why can’t certain film productions get childhood icons right?

Every week, Landon Palmer and Cole Abaius log on to their favorite chat client of 1996 as Raptureness316 and TMal4TheWin in order to discuss some topical topic of interest. This week, the pair try to avoid being pretentious at all costs while discussion The Tree of Life, dismissive reactions to art we don’t understand or like, and the nature of randomness in creation. What is art? And what does Hitler have to do with it?

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we talk with Louder Than a Bomb director Greg Jacobs and get an update on how Cannes is shaping up from Simon Gallagher. Plus, Eric D. Snider from Film.com and our very own Matt Patches enter the squared circle of our Movie News Pop Quiz. Then, we spend less than 15 minutes defining art. Take that, thousands of years of philosophy. We get the job done here at Reject Radio, so kick off you shoes and stay awhile. Listen Here: Download This Episode

It’s just a matter of time before enigmatic artist Banksy becomes so enmeshed into popular culture that his name becomes shorthand for a sexual maneuver where you film your partner on CCTV while wearing a monkey mask and decrying the police state. Seriously, folks. Can we make that happen? Yes, we can. One day in the future when we all realize that Banksy was thirty to forty different people, we’ll look back on this as a quaint time when we were all starting to re-question art on our own terms. Like some French guy slapping a urinal on a wall and pissing on definitions, it’s another generation’s turn to figure out what art is. That can be a lot of fun, but so can making a lot of money. Check out the new trailer for How to Sell a Banksy and try to figure out why anyone would want to spend so much time scraping bits of a paper off a concrete wall:

Bad writing is normally inexcusable in filmmaking because it’s difficult to build a skyscraper from blueprints done in crayon. Beyond the realm of movies, writing has been a fundamental piece of our humanity – relaying messages as diverse as the novel that showed you the beauty of heartbreak to the to-do list slung up on your refrigerator. We are all writers in one way or another. One man, desperate to become a writer in a very certain way, takes Bad Writing as a documentary project to see why he can’t progress as a poet, and from the looks of the trailer, the main reason is that his poetry is – well, it’s bad. Fortunately, he’s got some great writers together to discuss the how and the what and the why of it all. [Apple]

Nicolas Winding Refn is a great filmmaker. He’s also an avid toy collector and a man obsessed with violence and criminals. Watch how these things come together as we enter the mind of the man who gave us Bronson.

Overall, this movie is something to envy of our friends in the major markets, to hope gets a wider release, and to impatiently wait for until the DVD comes out.

This is clear evidence that hoodlums and criminals aren’t the ones defacing public property, it is movie geeks

After scouring Gallery 1988, I found that they have alot more cool art. For instance, the coolest one I found was called “Nobody Wants To Play Sega With Harrison Ford.”